Well, adieu, dear Mamma; I can write no more. If I live and prosper, as you always say, I shall stop here three or four weeks more, and when I come back I will tell you more of Munich, for in a letter it is hard to know where to begin. I like it very much; that I must say—though one would have to train a cook to make decent sauces. You see, I am an old woman, with my life behind me, and I have nothing more to look forward to on earth. But if, for example, Erica should—if she lives and prospers—marry here, I should have nothing against it; that I must say.
Again the Consul was obliged to stop eating and lean back in his chair to laugh.
“She is simply priceless, Mother. And when she tries to dissimulate, she is incomparable. She is a thousand miles away from being able to carry it off.”
“Yes, Tom,” said the Frau Consul, “she is a good child, and deserves good fortune.” And she finished the letter.
CHAPTER II
At the end of April Frau Grünlich returned home. Another epoch was behind her, and the old existence began again—attending the daily devotions and the Jerusalem evenings and hearing Lea Gerhardt read aloud. Yet she was obviously in a gay and hopeful mood.
Her brother, the Consul, fetched her from the station—she had come from Buchen—and drove her through the Holsten Gate into the town. He could not resist paying her the old compliment—how, next to Clothilde, she was the prettiest one in the family; and she answered: “Oh, Tom, I hate you! To make fun of an old lady like that—”
But he was right, nevertheless: Madame Grünlich kept her good looks remarkably. You looked at the thick ash-blonde hair, rolled at the sides, drawn back above the little ears, and fastened on the top of the head with a broad tortoise-shell comb; at the soft expression of her grey-blue eyes, her pretty upper lip, the fine oval and delicate colour of her face—and you thought of three-and-twenty, perhaps; never of thirty. She wore elegant hanging gold earrings, which, in a somewhat different form, her grandmother had worn before her. A loose bodice of soft dark silk, with satin revers and flat lace epaulettes, gave her pretty bosom an enchanting look of softness and fulness.
She was in the best of tempers. On Thursday, when Consul Buddenbrook and the ladies from Broad Street, Consul Kröger, Clothilde, Sesemi Wiechbrodt and Erica came to tea, she talked vividly about Munich. The beer, the noodles, the artist who wanted to paint her, and the court coaches had made the greatest impressions. She mentioned Herr Permaneder in passing; and Pfiffi Buddenbrook let fall a word or two to the effect that such a journey might be very agreeable, but did not seem to have any practical results. Frau Grünlich passed this by with dignity, though she put back her head and tucked in her chin. She fell into the habit now, whenever the vestibule bell rang through the entry, of hurrying to the landing to see who had come. What might that mean? Probably only Ida Jungmann, Tony’s governess and year-long confidante, knew that. Ida would say, “Tony, my child, you will see: he’ll come.”
The family was grateful to the returned traveller for her cheering presence; for the atmosphere of the house sadly needed brightening. The relations between the head of the firm and his younger brother had not improved. Indeed, they had grown sadly worse. Their Mother, the Frau Consul, followed with anxious misgivings the course of events and had enough to do to mediate between the two. Her hints to visit the office more regularly were received in absent silence by Christian. He met his brother’s remonstrances with a mortified air, making no defence, and for a few days would apply himself with somewhat more zeal to the English correspondence. But there developed more and more in the elder an irritated contempt for the younger brother, not decreased by the fact that Christian received his occasional rebukes without seeming offence, only looking at him with the usual absent disquiet in his eyes.